I am both a developer and a designer. I think coding to the standard is very important, but this is more of a personal opinion. We are all here to improve, use the best techniques that are allowed to us. ATM, I don't see a point of coding in XHTML 1.1 because I would rather wait for XHTML 2.0. Between 1.0 and 1.1, there aren't that many differences from one another. The release of 2.0 will be a whole lot better along with CSS 3.0.